Blog Glob: "Finding Interior Peace In the Ordinary Practice of Law"

Personal unhappiness, coupled with negative public perceptions of the legal profession as a whole, has spurred a search for legal reform focused on ways to achieve greater understanding and knowledge of the self. This has taken shape in a wide range of endeavors that seek to humanize the practice of law.35 One of the more popular efforts is mindfulness meditation based on the Buddhist tradition. Offered as a way to achieve self-awareness and inner peace, to alleviate suffering, and to achieve happiness,36 mindfulness has been defined as “being aware, moment to moment, without judgment, of one’s bodily sensations, thoughts, emotions, and consciousness.”37 Proponents of mindfulness meditation suggest that it can serve a range of goals including improved ethical negotiating behavior38 and better mediator performance: “Mindfulness allows mediators to make

better judgments about how the mediation process should work because it enables them to keep a focus on goals and to maintain a moment-to-moment awareness (to be ‘present’ with themselves and others).”39

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The legal profession is beginning to pay attention. Several law schools have integrated mindfulness into their dispute resolution curriculums;41 prominent law firms have conducted mindfulness training42 and the ABA Section of Dispute Resolution has supported mindfulness programs for lawyers.43 In one of his ABA Journal columns dedicated to the search for inner satisfaction in the legal life, Steven Keeva turns to mindfulness meditation in the medical context and argues for the right of lawyers to express their emotions, ... .44 Describing what he says is many practitioners’ obsession with thinking like a lawyer, being more concerned with the construct of the case rather than the person of the client sitting across from them, Keeva quotes approvingly from the director of the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Healthcare and Society at the University of Massachusetts: “ ‘The linear, discursive mind has come loose from its moorings—its proper place. . . . We have built a boat and mistaken it for the sea. Yet beyond the labels of patient of practitioner [read ‘client and lawyer’] we are all in the same boat thirsting for the same living water.’ ”45

What explains the current attraction of mindfulness meditation? A law school graduate who attended three mindfulness retreats provides one answer: “ ‘Since we bill ourselves as master strategists and problem-solvers, lawyers